Like everyone else with a lick of moral sense, I was shamed and saddened by the news out of Duke University last February that a freshman student was paying her tuition bills by doing porn. Belle Knox, as she called herself in print, felt no shame when she was publicly exposed by a male classmate, who recognized her while—you guessed it—watching porn. (He wasn’t ashamed either.) Doing porn, Knox told the Duke student newspaper, is “liberating. It’s probably the most empowered I have ever felt.”

The expected moral outrage never developed. If sermons were preached against the degradation of pornography, they did not penetrate the church walls; if a scarlet letter appeared in the night sky, no one reported it. Instead, Knox very quickly became a victim. The sin against her? An outrage called “slut-shaming.” Facebook postings and Twitter messages ridiculed her; girls on campus glared at her, boys yelled, “You’re the porn star!” “There were stares and whispers in the dining hall,” Knox complained to the Huffington Post. “After I was outed, every single day waking up was like a nightmare.”

Defenders leaped to her side. “This country is in a trillion dollar student loan debt,” the website College Candy reasoned, “Duke is $60,000 a year, so if someone has to make a few porno movies to get a good education, who is anyone to judge?”

We must be non-judgmental toward one another, because moral judgment is so yesterday. “To suggest—as many Duke students have on various message boards—that [Knox] is somehow deserving of harassment or abuse because she works in adult films sets us back about five decades, if not five centuries,” a libertarian blogger explained.

“You have to be a stranger to the landscape to regard it as a view.” — Geoff Dyer

“I wish I had your passion, Ray, misdirected as it may be. But it is still a passion.” — Terrence Mann to Ray Kinsella, in Field of Dreams

Author’s note: I’m delighted to be participating in the Glen Workshop this coming June, and would love you to join me to explore the personal (and American) dream narratives in cinema. The journey I took into this subject changed my life, and I hope we can have a similar impact in exploring the same questions together.

My new book Cinematic States takes a look at American myths in one of their most powerful forms. Looking at one movie from each of the fifty states of my adopted homeland I’m asking whether a Kansas yellow brick road really does lead to the end of the rainbow, and does it first have to pass through Colorado’s Overlook Hotel? Amidst the multipurpose woodchippers, friendly exorcists and faulty motel showers, resurrected baseball players and miracle-working gardeners, what do the stories we tell reveal about ourselves, and how can we reimagine who we are?

It was a fascinating experience to research the book, and I discovered immense wells of rich variety in this country that is so easily dismissed by many for its errors, real and perceived.

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About “Good Letters”

For the humanists of the Renaissance, literature mattered because it was concrete and experiential—it grounded ideas in people’s lives. Their name for this kind of writing was bonae litterae, a phrase we’ve borrowed as the title for Image’s blog. Every weekday, one of the gifted writers on our blogging team will offer a personal essay that makes a fresh connection between the world of faith and the world of daily life, spanning the gap between theology and experience and giving language a human shape.